The Monkey Cage

What does Tom Coburn M.D. have against people who study political behavior? Yes, most of his report is simply about removing funding from political science as a whole. But the guy really seems to have it in for political behavior. First, he notes:

The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

So his opening salvo is that pundits working for for-profit networks (including this guy) with all the accompanying pressure of the 24 hour news cycle are equally adept at analyzing voting behavior as academics trained to do rigorous analysis of, well, voting behavior. (And as a side note, Senator Coburn is obviously not familiar with the fact that the “seemingly endless commentators on the internet” need to pay $19.95/month in order to pour over this data.)

If that’s not enough, we then find this gem tucked in at the very end of the report:

Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters.

So in addition to the pundits, we’ve now added politicians, voters, and, for some reason, historians (but not, of course, historians with access to publicly available survey data) to the list of those who ought to be analyzing political behavior. In other words, pretty much everyone except, well, political scientists. By this logic, we should probably leave the theories about biology to people who cover science on the news, people who get sick, and, for what I’m sure are similarly good reasons, historians.

All this makes me curious about Coburn’s motivation for targeting political science. I originally assumed this was just some sort of cheap publicity stunt, but as Andy’s post points out, there were probably better ways to shock voters than lists of grants for the study of political science. And interestingly, while the report does start off by criticizing funding on “social studies and economics” (which, incidentally, according to Coburn, ate up $325 million last year as opposed to $91.3 million on political science over the last ten years ), it then immediately loses interest in other fields in an effort to focus exclusively on denying funding to political science. Is it because we have the audacity to include the word “science” in the name of our discipline? Is it because Coburn might not like having his own behavior studied (although truly, if I was Coburn, I’d be more worried about the medical ethicists)? Or does he just prefer to get his election analysis from cable TV? I certainly don’t know, but it makes you wonder.

Finally, for those looking for a more serious defense of the value of political science research then you are going to find in a blog post, I’d recommend Skip Lupia’s PS Article “Evaluating Political Science Research: Information for Buyers and Sellers” (gated and ungated).